Page 87 - Sport Culture and the Media

68 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

to the fore. In this way, no artificial separation can be maintained between the
‘light’ sphere of culture and symbols and the ‘heavy’ world of economics and
material objects. Instead, culture, social relations and economics can be seen –
as is entirely appropriate under conditions where the economies and social
structures of advanced capitalist societies are becoming increasingly dependent
on cultural processes – to be inextricably linked in a manner that defies a
simple equation involving arrows pointing in a single, determining direction.
The sphere of culture is now more than ever where the key economic processes
of production, distribution and exchange take place. At the same time, cultural
production is always directly or indirectly, currently or potentially, connected to
the world of making products, supplying services and generating profits.
I have argued here that the media are both the driving economic and cultural
force in sport because they provide (or attract) most of the capital that in turn
creates and disseminates the images and information, which then generate more
capital and more sport, in an ascending spiral. Booms in capital accumulation
are periodically subject to dramatic busts, as the 1987 Wall Street crash,
the 1997 ‘meltdown’ of the Asian ‘tiger economies’ and the 2000 ‘dot.bomb’
demonstrate. There has been no such dramatic contraction of the media sports
economy in general, but its seemingly unstoppable momentum slowed not
long after the new century was born (and as the first edition of this book was
published!). I will discuss below some of the latest twists and turns in media
economics, but the chapter will inevitably reflect the extraordinary growth of
media sport rather more than its current difficulties. As Toby Miller (1999: 115)
has argued, expenditure on sport has heretofore seemed immune to ‘con-
ventional business cycles’ and ‘has grown through most recessions’. In recent
memory, therefore, words like downswing and contraction have found little
expression in the lexicon of the media sports cultural complex. It has been
difficult, therefore, to question the ‘article of faith for broadcasters that sports
programming was a river of gold’ (Maiden 2002: 33). But nothing undermines
business faith more than the arrival of the receivers and the administrators,
as has occurred in such high-profile media sport cases (discussed later in the
chapter) as KirchMedia, XFL, C7 and ITV Digital.
The fortunes of individual sports and also of media companies can, in the
ordinary course of things, shift rapidly in response to the involvement of
sponsors, crowd attendance and TV ratings, broadcast rights, and so on. It is
useful, then, to appraise the major forces in media sport, the ways in which they
cooperate and conflict, and the consequences of this economic activity for sport
and the wider society and culture. If no single party can be said to dominate the
media sports cultural complex or to control its ‘image bank’, it can hardly be
denied that the presence of major economic entities has resulted in far-reaching
changes to the sport we see and read about, and to the culture in which it is